The 10 Best Restaurants in Washington, D.C.

Long an underdog in the culinary scene, the nation's capital is roaring back into the conversation—where it deserves to be.

Tim Carman

If outsiders were cynical about Michelin’s decision to publish a dining guide in Washington—basically calling D.C. the kind of retrograde, black-tie cow that appeals to French sensibilities—locals were almost giddy. In making the District only the fourth U.S. city with a Michelin Guide, the tire company confirmed what many here have known for years: The D.C. dining scene has come into its own.

Long ridiculed as a town with unlimited bank and a limited palate, addicted to red wine and meat, Washington has nurtured a new generation of chefs dedicated to quirky, personalized cuisines that draw from culinary traditions near and far. These cooks take risks once considered unthinkable in this steakhouse town, whether it’s James Beard Award winner Johnny Monis opening a subterranean spot, Little Serow, devoted to north eastern Thai cooking, or former McCrady’s chef de cuisine Jeremiah Langhorne exploring the flora and fauna of the Mid-Atlantic at the Dabney.

The free-wheeling style of Washington’s dining scene has become, in a sense, self-replicating. The success of Little Serow has inspired others to follow Monis’ lead and open their own authentic Thai eateries. Likewise, the instant fame of Rose’s Luxury, the Barracks Row restaurant where people will wait in line for hours to sample the carefully engineered mashups (think: spaghetti with spicy strawberry sauce), gave chef Aaron Silverman the confidence to up the ante with his new fine-dining restaurant, Pineapple and Pearls. He calls it “Rose’s super fine-tuned.”

Add it all up, and Washington is slowly, inexorably morphing into a U.S. dining destination. Seven short years ago, a former New York Times food critic couldn’t even name enough restaurants to fill a top 10 list. (Her compilation for Politico stopped at eight.) Today, I think a similar exercise would prove a far harder task. I know it was for me.

Little Serow

Johnny Monis, best known for the Greek-influenced fare at Komi, took a sharp left turn with his second project, a moody subterranean spot dedicated to the fresh, pungent flavors of Northeastern Thailand, a place that has special meaning for the chef. In the region that borders Laos and Cambodia, Monis married Anne Marler, his partner in life and the restaurant business. Like so many contemporary chefs, Monis fell for the in-your-face components of Isaan cooking: its fiery chiles, its funky fish sauce, its bracing acids and its freshly picked herbs and greens. The chef incorporates all of these elements in a rollercoaster of a tasting menu, which takes you on such chili pepper highs you may fear for your palate. But fret not: Monis always brings you safely back to Earth, usually with his rich, sticky whiskey pork ribs.

What to eat: The tasting menu is set, but it often features fresh greens and radishes, pork rinds with a spicy dipping paste, whiskey pork ribs and, of course, a basket of sticky rice, which is essentially your eating utensil for the meal.

The Dabney

Jeremiah Langhorne, former chef de cuisine of McCrady’s in Charleston, decided to return home to Washington and do for the Mid-Atlantic what his mentor, Sean Brock, has done for the South: revive the ingredients and reinterpret the cuisine that once defined the region. Langhorne’s vision requires a pantry stocked with products unavailable from any wholesaler: vinegars, misos, fermented vegetables, powders, cured meats and more, all developed over time with ingredients from the farms, streams and forests of the Mid-Atlantic. The chef prepares his dishes in a large, wood-fired hearth, not just as a nod to the Old Ways but as a reminder about the elemental nature of cooking—to take heat and human ingenuity and transform the raw into the delicious.

What to eat: The menu changes from week to week, depending on the ingredients in season. But if available, try the lightly smoked mackerel, spicy pork sausage toast, Atlantic snapper with Maryland blue crab and the aged duck from Whistle Pig Hollow farm.

Fiola

James Beard winner Fabio Trabocchi had a tough run in New York after impressing diners and critics at the four-star Maestro in Tysons Corner, Va. Yet his return to Washington has been anything but a retreat. The chef and his wife and business partner, Maria Trabocchi, have quickly become a force on the D.C. scene, running three respected dining rooms, with more to come. To my mind, Fiola remains the flagship. The Penn Quarter restaurant has improved with age; in the five years since opening, the Trabocchis have continued to refine the food, the platings, and the service, despite turnover in both front and back of the house. Fiola has established itself as the gold standard for Italian fine dining in Washington, restlessly searching for more artistic presentations while remaining true to the cuisine’s affection for simple, high-quality ingredients.

What to eat: Fiola offers customizable tasting menus of two, three and four courses, plus dessert. The dinner menu changes regularly, but if available, order the tomato gazpacho with blue crab, miso black cod, smoked potato gnocchi with frutti di mare, and scallop carpaccio.

El Sol Restaurante & Tequileria

After enduring decades of inferior south-of-the-border cooking, the District has suddenly become flush with authentic Mexican fare, none better this small operation run by Alfredo and Jessica Solis, a pair of kitchen refugees from the Passion Food Hospitality group. The siblings from Mexico City take their native cuisine and infuse it with personal touches: They buy the same quality ingredients found at white-tablecloth restaurants and manipulate them into dishes of complexity and beauty, down to the housemade tortillas, which are thin and fragrant, the perfect wrappers for any filling. This is chef-driven Mexican cooking at taqueria prices. No, it’s more than that: It’s the first top-tier Mexican restaurant in Washington run by a native of the country.

What to eat: There’s nary a miss on the menu, but my go-to dishes include the queso fundido with chorizo, ceviche, pozole rojo, mole rojo, carnitas gordita, and any one of the tacos produced in this tiny, hard-working kitchen.

CherCher Ethiopian Restaurant

The epicenter of Washington’s sizable Ethiopian community has shifted north to Silver Spring, MD, where the downtown teems with coffee shops and restaurants that cater to expats. But down on Ninth Street NW in Washington, Alemayehu “Alex” Abebe runs the exquisite CherCher, a primal, meat-centric eatery that attracts clusters of chatty men native to Ethiopia or Eritrea. They go for the beef, and so should you. The entry-level option is CherCher’s “special” kitfo, an almost pureed mound of raw beef spiked with sour, piney cardamom. The advanced option is the kurt, in which raw squares of ribeye, the yellow fat cap still attached, are arranged on a round of spongy injera flatbread; the meat is served with a piquant awaze sauce, mimita powder and senafitch, a condiment built from Ethiopian mustard seeds, which assaults your nasal passages and your tongue.

Maketto

This 6,000-square-foot playground is like the Walmart Supercenter for millennials. Maketto combines a third-wave coffee shop and café upstairs with a downstairs retail shop, craft cocktail bar, and full-service restaurant dedicated to the cooking of Cambodia and Taiwan. There’s even a dim-sum service on Sundays and an outdoor vending machine with toys, cell phone chargers, and Asian snacks. About the only thing missing is used vinyl for sale. Chefs Erik Bruner-Yang and James Wozniak are the creative minds behind the restaurant; they used Maketto’s painfully long construction build-out to travel to Southeast Asia and refine the dishes that would eventually grace their menus. You’ll find both the predictable (pork buns) and the surprising (Maketto fried chicken and bread, sort of the Taiwanese version of chicken and waffles), all of it executed with an obsessive attention to detail.

Jaleo

Jose Andres, the chef powerful enough to take on Donald Trump, has built an empire in the D.C. area, but his best restaurant remains his first: the downtown tapas emporium Jaleo, which introduced Washingtonians to Spanish small plates more than 20 years ago. The place was redesigned a few years ago, making it simultaneously hipper and kitschier. The menu is basically an ode to the chef’s mother country, his mentor Ferran Adria (the brilliant mind behind the now closed elBulli) and Andres’ own business savvy (the chef helped introduce jamon iberico de bellota to America, and the buttery, four-year-aged ham is still served here). Given the tapas-ization of menus from coast to coast, you could argue that Andres and Jaleo are two of the most influential entities in the United States.

Texas Jack's

No one will confuse Washington with Memphis or Kansas City, but this newcomer in Arlington has quickly established itself as a heavyweight among the barbecue lightweights in the area. Its secret weapon is Matt Lang, the former pitmaster at Brooklyn’s Fette Sau, who was lured to D.C. to open this craft-conscious smokehouse in the suburbs. Lang both respects tradition and defies it: His beautifully bark-encrusted slices of brisket are almost homages to Central Texas, where the smokehouses rely on little more than salt, pepper, smoke, and time to transform beef into something succulent. Lang’s pulled pork, by contrast, ventures farther south than the Carolinas, all the way to the Yucatan, which lends its spices to this minimalist plate of pork. Lang even dotes over his sides, including the inventive, intercontinental mashup of pork, pinto beans and risotto.

What to eat: Brisket, the St. Louis-style spare ribs, the beef short rib, the mac and three cheeses, and the porky pinto beans with risotto.

Pineapple and Pearls

Newly minted James Beard winner Aaron Silverman has reinvented the fine-dining experience with his intimate Barracks Row restaurant, located next door to Rose’s Luxury, the place that introduced the chef’s playful cooking to D.C. diners. Unlike Rose’s, you don’t have to wait in line. But you do have to go online and fight for one of the 22 seats in the dining room, which are available four weeks out from your desired reservation date. By the time, you walk into Pineapple and Pearls, your $250 tab will have already been paid, including tax, tip and drinks. You’ll be able to revel in Silverman’s tasting menu without the sticker shock that accompanies many tabs at similar gastronomic temples. For that princely sum, Silverman and his collaborators in the kitchen and bar will ply you with a meal unlike anything at Per Se, the French Laundry, or Alinea. It will draw upon culinary traditions rarely explored in fine-dining circles: Mexican and Chinese cuisines, Texas barbecue, even fast-food. A dish of roasted potato ice cream with caviar was described to me as tasting like a Wendy’s Frosty with fries.

What to eat: The menu is set by the chef and varies from week to week. It has previously included such gems as a fennel-and-absinthe bon bon, spring garlic egg drop soup and smoked beef rib with mole.

Chez Dior

Washington has a mother lode of Ethiopian and Eritrean eateries but still doesn’t offer much in the way of West African fare, especially the food of Senegal. Mamadou Fall and his partner, Binette Seck, opened Chez Dior more than two years ago in the Maryland suburbs, and they serve as eager, accommodating hosts to those unfamiliar with the Senegalese table. The uninitiated should start with the yassa chicken, an easygoing plate of char-grilled legs that can be paired with any number of accompaniments: a lemony onion sauce, fluffy white rice or a flamethrowing condiment blended with Jamaican hot peppers. Any way you line up the components, you hit the jackpot. Whatever you order, the kitchen will plate it with the white-china elegance of a restaurant with far higher price points. It’s a smart move to attract newcomers, who will fall for the food at first sight.

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